Quicken Sucks: Why Can’t Personal Finance Management Be Easy?

Not long ago I ranted about online banking and eventually found a solution that didn’t involve swearing at financial institutions. At least until I tried to download my transaction history and import it into Quicken.

OK, so I tend to put this standard practice off. I should probably do it once a month, I do it more like once every four months. Yes, I procrastinate. Look at my lawn, realize it’s true and get over it.

So the other day I went to update my transactions and Quicken started giving me incoherent errors. Stuff about not having my financial institution’s information correct, not being able to connect with Quicken.com and other errors that made no sense. I checked everything, I made sure the info I was downloading from my bank was good, I even waited a few days in case Quicken was having a temporary glitch.

As of April 30, 2007, in accordance with the Quicken discontinuation policy, online services and live technical support will no longer be available for Quicken 2004 users.

Quicken sucks.

Apparently Quicken 2004 is too old and so not only do they no longer support it, but I can no longer use it with any online services–i.e., downloading financial information from my bank and importing it to Quicken. I’m not sure what Quicken has to do with supporting that since I don’t interface with Quicken.com at all–I get info straight from my bank and the rest of the process can happen offline (as far as I know).

But no matter, they’ve neutered my software. And the only way I found out was three frustrating days of trying and waiting and then finally scouring their web site for info. The neutered software itself didn’t even bother to happily inform me that I need an upgrade.

Oh, and the upgrade? $70. So I need to spend $70 to continue managing my personal finances. Have I mentioned how much Quicken sucks?

Solutions
With burning hatred for Quicken, I wanted to do anything but hand them $70 to de-neuter my software. I need to track my spending so I can do budgeting (not that we’re slaves to a budget or even very good at following one, but it helps me answer basic questions like, “Can we afford daycare?” and “Can we afford a second car?” More importantly, I need to track spending for tax purposes–everything from business income and expenses to all the tax stuff like home improvement and home office expenses. At the end of the year (OK, more like February or March when I meet with my tax guy) I need to be able to put together a report showing my spending and income in all those categories. Quicken handled all of this nicely, especially once I figured out how to download and import my bank info (never again will I enter every receipt by hand). It was never fun or easy (which is why I always put it off), but it did the job (until now).

I checked out web 2.0 options and came across Wesabe, which is sort of a social spending tracker kind of thing. I could care less about the social aspect, but the tracking was pretty handy and it could import my bank info. It’s free and has the advantage of being online so I could do my banking anywhere with an Internet connection (like while watching TV, as opposed to being chained to my desktop like I am with Quicken). Unfortunately, their budgeting features are lame and their tracking tools just aren’t as functional as Quicken (yet). I could make it work, but it’d involve setting up a whole new system and I’d still have to use my old version of Quicken to handle budgeting and just do a manual check to see if we’re within budget. Meh.

I considered a few other solutions, from other web 2.0 sites (few seemed to have all the features of Wesabe) to switching banks for better online services, but nobody seems to have the whole package.

It seems personal finance and online banking is a booming industry. I came across twoblogs covering the industry and I’m sure there are loads more.

But for all the activity, I don’t think anyone has figured out how to make personal finance management simple and easy. If banks were smart they’d figure out how to integrate it into their online banking services. Why download my info when I could track it all with my bank? Just give me the ability to categorize and tag transactions, let me do customized reporting and let me do budgeting. I think that’s where banks are moving (Wells Fargo is getting pretty close on the categorization, though it seems they pick the categories for you–how dumb is that?), but nobody is quite there yet.

So unless anyone has better ideas, I might be gritting my teeth and handing Quicken $70. I’d rather pay that much or more in bank fees or a subscription site that let me do everything I want, but I just haven’t found it yet.

Bastards. All it does is cause a lot of frustration and ill-will towards Quicken, making me not want to upgrade to the point that I’d spend more on a competitor’s option.

Even if the software itself told me what happened and that I need to upgrade it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s the fact the whole thing just freaked out and I had to track down the upgrade notice. That’s just giving a middle finger to your customers.

Have you considered Mvelopes? I don’t know much about it, but I’m starting to look into it. They’re definitely friendly to budgeting! That seems to be their whole goal. Maybe that plus Wesabe would be what you need.

Keep fighting, Kevin! Capitalism only works when little guys like us screw the bad businesses and reward the good ones. So let’s screw ’em.

I just had the same miserable experience with 2006 quicken software. I fired off email to them but I see my suspicions were totally correct. A deliberate bomb planted and timed to go off in 3 years to force us to update. And then that wretched error message. How stupid so they think we users are?

I, too, didn’t upgrade, buying SplashMoney for $20 instead (free trial). I’ll never buy Quicken again and I promised Quicken I would tell as many as I could about their low trick. Yours is the first site I’ve visited. I’m glad to see you and others are sounding off, too.

Quicken has been on a downhill slide for years. I’ve been a quicken user since the product was first introduced. The original designers aimed to make a program that was quick and efficient to use (thus the name Quicken) and they succeeded. However, there was a major revamp with the version that followed Quicken 6, and I simply stopped upgrading at that point.

I recently upgraded my computer to a new machine and (of course) a new OS — Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Went to install my trusty copy of Quicken 6… And it won’t install. Bummer.

So I went and purchased Quicken 2009. Quickly discovered that is is a bad as ever. But the major complaint is that they no longer support the .qif import format. Ironically that is the only format that several of my financial sites will provide. (labeled “microsoft money” on one of them.)

With a bit of rummaging I discovered that with a bit of work Quicken 6 will run on a Vista-64 machine. You have to copy the program files folder over from your old computer (assuming you still have that around) as well as track down about a half dozen dlls that were originally installed in the winNT/System32 directory. (It works just fine if you put the dlls in the quicken directory).

Ugh… I have been dealing without Quicken for years for the same reasons you folks cite…
The problem is that my finances suffer because I can’t track them very easily.

Why can’t WellsFargo allow me to download “MY” data into another program with complete informaiton? For instance the categories that things are assigned to. I probably sound like a conspiricy theorist but I have to wonder if they are somehow in cahoots with Intuit/Quicken.

In this day and age it is not rocket science for banks to allow customers to download data in a particular format (standard) that allows them to import the information into a program of their choosing.

I just downloaded MoneyDance, but the categories are blank and the description/memo field is cut off too….I looked and I see it is the bank export not the program.. I have tried several different formats too….

Note that I was perfectly happy with MS Money. Is Quicken REALLY the ONLY home finance software out there? I’m tired of it losing transactions, not ‘finding’ the transaction that matches (Hey! I can see it right there! How come Quicken can’t?). What a piece of junk. Plus, it’s just too complicated for a home user. I’d use a spreadsheet, but I’d miss MS Money’s ability to download transactions.

Since the last message seems to be 2011 Just wanted to let everyone know Quicken is still doing the same thing.
I have Quicken 2014, when the 2015 came out I didn’t upgrade. got a message to update 2014 to fix bugs, I did. Now even when I build a file by downloading from my bank, the balance in Quicken is no where close to the balance at the bank. off by 78,000 dollars. For the last 2 days I have been manually updating the quicken file to match the bank’s records. but when I close quicken and reopen it. the corrections are no longer there. it’s still out of balance. I can download my data from the bank to an text file and open it with Excel. I built my own checkbooks program to balance accounts. I use quicken to print checks but don’t care about the balance in that stupid program file. I will never pay quicken another dime.

I’ve been a quicken user for over a decade, often choosing to upgrade every few years. I made the mistake of upgrading to Quicken 2016, which has been nothing but a nightmare. If it’s not the software updates crashing, it seems to randomly become unable to download transactions (one of it’s key features), and often randomly forgets passwords to my accounts (what a joy).
And whatever you do, don’t forget your intuit account credentials either (which may or may be different than the credentials you use for Turbotax; depending upon the phase of the moon. What a total piece of crap!

A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.

The personal site of Kevin D. Hendricks: Sharing ideas I can’t get out of my head, including causes, local politics, and lots of books. Since 1998. Kevin is a writer and editor with his company, Monkey Outta Nowhere, in St. Paul, Minn.